Classic public choice skepticism about the regulatory state, based on theories of rent-seeking, rent extraction and regulatory capture, is based on the unrealistic, and usually unstated, assumption of a monopolist regulator. In practice, the regulatory state is polycentric, involving numerous...

In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F. A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...

This book considers the relationship between Hayek and Mill, taking issues with Hayek's criticism of Mill and providing a broader perspective of the liberal tradition. Featuring contributions from the likes of Ross Emmett, Leon Montes and Robert Garnett, these chapters ask whether Hayek had an...

This paper revisits the debates about the meaning of economic efficiency, and the moral dilemmas associated with using Kaldor-Hicks efficiency or Pareto efficiency for policy analysis. I lay out the best case for efficiency as meta-value, and highlight that it still does not allow us to evade...

This paper explains how to use the calculus of consent framework to think more rigorously about self-governance, and applies this framework to the issue of evaluating federal regulatory agencies. Robust political economy is the idea that institutions should be designed to work well even under...

Over the past four decades, across the OECD countries and beyond, we observe a simultaneous increase (a) in the number, the budgets and the staffing of regulatory agencies, as well as the number of regulations, and (b) of economic liberalization, as measured by economic freedom and doing...

The success of the scientific community challenges in many ways our theories of social cooperation and public goods production. It is a very large scale, decentralized, international organization lacking any central management or a formalized legislative or rule-enforcement body. Even the...